China, day 2 (June 30, 2006)
… another day. The pictures my father has taken so far are up: Trip to China 2006 gallery (thanks to Jon for the gallery space).
Dawn of the Second Day
48 Hours Remain
(And probably no one gets the Majora's Mask joke.)
We got an early start on the second day because we were going to the Summer Palace, which gets very crowded, mostly with Chinese tourists. In the morning, we had breakfast at the hotel, which was interesting. Half of the food is what you would expect to see in a US hotel's breakfast buffet. The other half was asian food. So, they had someone taking orders for omletes and a couple meters over someone else was taking orders for noodles. IMHO, the noodles were better.
The Summer Palace was very pretty. It is a huge park/garden, which is mostly covered by a lake. We did not see the main buildings. Instead we walked across the lake. There is certainly too much to see there for one trip. There is not much to describe; it really has to be seen. The pictures start here with someone doing calligraphy on a sidewalk. On the way out, we saw that the Chinese have much more advanced weather forecasts:
For lunch, Jason (via cellphone) suggeted that we try Beijing University. The first thing we noticed when we got there was that there were a lot of people in commencement gowns of all colors taking pictures. We wondered around and eventually found someone who spoke English and could direct us to a restaurant. (The first couple we stopped to ask for directions were Chinese tourists, so, although they understood our question, they could not help us.) Eventually we came upon this small restaurant with a few westerners in it. They were students from the US (two from University of Colorado in Boulder, another I forget where from) doing a summer program at Beijing Unversity. They told us that we were in the best restaurant on campus and they ordered for us. Afterwards, they informed us that they could not read the menu much better than we could and they were ordering by describing the dishes. Also, they told us that they had been seeing people taking pictures in commencement gowns for the past week and could not figure out exactly what was going on with that.
Afterwards, we had been planning on going to Temple of Heaven, but we decided it was too late, so we looked in the guide book for a nearby location. We found a Confucian temple about fifteen minutes away from the university and asked a taxi driver to take us there. We should have gotten the hint after the taxi driver called someone on his cell phone after we told him where we wanted to go. He started driving around and kept pulling over and asking other taxi drivers for directions. Apparently, this temple is not a very popular tourist location. The taxi driver eventually found it fourty-five minutes after leaving, and we saw only two other tourists, a Chinese couple. We walked around and took a few pictures before returning to the hotel.
After a little down time in the hotel, we headed to a hot pot restaurant for dinner. For those of you unfamilar with the concept, basically, there were two types of soup in the middle of the table (one mild, one spicy) with a burner below it keeping it boiling. We got food to put into the soup to cook like fish, very finely sliced lamp (it was cooked almost as soon as it touched the boiling soup), and some vegetables. It was a very good meal. ^^
The most intesting part of the meal was the noodles. They were just boiled dough, but it has to be stretched out somehow. This restaurant had a very interesting method. They had people who would bring the dough to the table and stretch it out by swinging it around and basically dancing with it. It was quite entertaining. My father tried to take a video, but I am not sure if it came out.
After that, I was ready for bed, but my father wanted to go shopping. We walked from the hotel to a nearby tea shop. When we walked in, the lady who was apparently the shop's English expert walked up to us. Her English was quite good. I was surprised at how much work she put into trying to make a sale. She kept on opening packages to offer samples, even if my father said he was not interested. Eventually we got out of there with some tea and some crackers, and I fell asleep rather soon after we returned to the hotel.
To be continued…